Is the National Enquirer Reliable? The Revenge of Priest-Klein
posted by Dave Hoffman
Check out this good article about the National Enquirer’s pursuit of the John Edwards adultery story. Contra Kaus, surely the most likely reason that the mainstream press was reluctant to follow up on the N.E.’s allegations is that the paper is, quite literally, supermarket trash, and thus presumed to be unreliable.
Not so, says its editor David Perel:
“[C]ontrary to what you might think, the Enquirer’s record in courtroom lawsuits is no better or worse than other media outlets. Unknown is the number of out-of-court settlements the paper has had. ‘Every newspaper gets sued; It’s a fact of life,’ Perel (left) said. ‘But, you know, we do pretty well. That’s not to say we get everything right. We don’t. But you show the newspaper that does, I’ll start subscribing to it right now.’”
The italicized bit is key. As the Priest-Klein selection hypothesis predicts, we can’t learn much about the merits of parties’ pre-suit behavior by looking at outputs from the litigation process. Maybe the National Enquirer is much less reliable than other papers: it gets more demands for retractions, pays out more cash to keep individuals from filing lawsuits, and settles earlier in the life of litigation to avoid verdicts. Or maybe it is much more reliable. Nothing about the rate that a litigant wins in court tells you a thing about that party’s merits – it doesn’t even tell you anything meaningful about the law firm’s acuity. After all, when I used to work at Cravath, I observed that we lost much more often than we won in Court, but the cases that were publicly exposed were the exceptional runts of the litter. [That said, I think that exceptional win or loss streaks have meaning, a topic I'll likely return to in a later post, to talk about one attorney I know who has won all fifty civil jury cases he's tried over a long career.]
Still, just for fun, I checked in the WL PLEADINGS database, which contains several million complaints and trial pleadings from both state and federal court over (around) the last eight years, and ran the following searches, looking only at filed complaints:
1. “national enquirer” & libel defamation “false light” : 17 results.
2. “news corporation” & libel defam! slander “false light”: 19 results
3. “Philadelphia inquirer” & libel defamation “false light” : 29 results.
4. “boston globe” & libel defam! slander “false light”: 45 results
5. “new york post” & libel defam! slander “false light”: 54 results
6. “new york times” & libel defam! slander “false light”: 212 results
What does this tell you? Maybe that that the Times is the most reliable paper of the bunch, because it is willing to stand up for stories than other papers, at least to the extent that it forces plaintiffs to sue, while other papers prefer to settle at the first whiff of trouble. Or maybe the Times is the least reliable paper. The public data don’t exclude either hypothesis. Nor is the fact that the Enquirer is the middle of the fact particularly informative. The Priest-Klein hypothesis sure is a buzzkill.
August 18, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, First Amendment
Print This Post
Responses (6)
palindrom - August 18, 2008 at 11:35 pm
is it clear that the NYT was a party in those cases, or does the 212 count include mentions of the NYT in pleadings that didn’t involve the NYT as a party?
dave hoffman - August 18, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Palindrom, no, you raise a good point, the search is overinclusive. You can limit by using the party name field, but I’m not convinced that it is particularly reliable. (You lose around half the search results if you put the Times as a party.)
Paul Horwitz - August 19, 2008 at 10:13 am
I think the last comment, at 9:06 am, really nails it. I couldn’t have said it better.
dave hoffman - August 19, 2008 at 10:28 am
Paul, I disagree. 仓储笼’s analysis, though it scans well, is basically incoherent. Check out in particular 仓储笼’s point about the relationship between viagra and selection effects. Balderdash.
Robert Lewis - August 19, 2008 at 10:06 pm
This is how the Chairman of American Media, the owner of the National Enquirer, registers to vote
webofdeception.com/#nationalenquirer
Robert Lewis - August 19, 2008 at 10:11 pm
This how the Chairman of American Media, the owner of the National Enquirer, registers to vote
webofdeception.com/#nationalenquirer
Leave a Reply